> video, but not supporting reliable way to stop autoplay

It's an almost incredible situation. Firefox and Safari have a setting to stop autoplay, but much of the time it doesn't actually work, and Chrome doesn't even seem to have a setting.

It's also amazing how when enough users decide that they hate some obnoxious web site behavior (pop-up windows, autoplaying video, etc.) enough to block it, the web site designer's response isn't "maybe we should be less obnoxious" but "how can we circumvent the user's preferences?"

If I may self-promote, my extension is the best in the business at stopping video autoplay, as far as I can tell. I've been refining this feature for several years. https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

Recently i found that while basic stop autoplay option in Firefox does not work reliably, if one also sets media.autoplay.blocking_policy = 2, it works much better than the default policy.

But it seems it is still just a heuristic that blocks some JS play commands, while allows them in some context.

I'm very curious about this. It absolutely cannot be halting-problem-tricky for a browser to deduce that it is downloading multiple frames of video/audio and simply stop it. The MIME types alone should be almost a complete answer.

user not customer

Firefox has never failed to stop autoplay for me. I don't have it set to stop all autoplay, because I watch an extreme amount of Youtube, but any tab that opens in the background or isn't focused has never failed to "Autoplay Blocked"

Firefox has about:config settings to disable autoplay.